CLASSICAL VIEW

CLASSICAL VIEW; Two Objects of Derision Celebrated

By Edward Rothstein

Published: October 6, 1991

A quarter-century ago, the Metropolitan Opera celebrated the move to its new house in Lincoln Center by giving the premiere of Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra." It was one of the great disasters of operatic history. At rehearsals, the extravagant production by Franco Zeffirelli had already broken the virgin stage's turntable under its weight. Opening night reviews were torn between panning the hall and panning the opera.

The week before last, by one of those strange coincidences only God or Shakespeare could have devised, the two objects of derision were once again celebrated. The Met opened its season by honoring the silver anniversary of the hall, and two nights later at Chicago's Lyric Opera came the premiere of the first opera-house "Antony" since the commissioned debacle at the Met. This conjunction revealed some suggestive reasons for the two disasters.

First the Met. As the company moved into its new building, Sir Rudolf Bing, its general manager, said: "We have been pregnant for so long." And the baby was so enormous: the new stage was six times as large as the old, the hall's capacity greater, the storage capabilities extraordinary.

But the new hall's stage, instead of having a proscenium like the old Met's, proclaiming its heritage with the inscribed names of Mozart, Verdi, Beethoven and others, had a gilded bulbous frame with a bewildering sculpture protruding from its top, heedless of style or sense. This esthetic uncertainty inside was matched by poor design outside the hall, evident in the dark, bottlenecked public spaces in the lobby and promenades. And then there were the costs.

The move to the new house marked what The Times called the company's "worst financial crisis in 35 years." Ticket prices had to be raised 20 percent during the first season. An Emergency Fund Drive was established. Costs for the first year in the new hall were more than 50 percent higher than those in the old Met. "We are like a family that moved from a cottage into a castle." said the Met's director of finance. "The upkeep . . . has proven staggering."

The house's fine acoustics are compensation, but large size and costs still have their ramifications, enforcing limitations on risky productions, restricting suitable repertory, demanding large, high-paying audiences. These forces also helped contribute to a style of musical event now familiar as large organizations become mature, dominant forces throughout musical life: the Institutional Performance.

The Institutional Performance tends to subordinate musical demands to institutional requirements; it then harnesses the music to help celebrate the institution. Mr. Zeffirelli is in such demand as designer of Met productions because he creates institutional sets, honoring the opera house in all its opulent possibility. Gala events like the Met opening nights are almost always Institutional Performances. This season, the gala showed the Institution as collector, offering acts from operas along with an array of stars presenting exquisitely sung arias as testimonials to the house.

An Institutional Performance must also have been desired by the Met in 1966. Barber, it was probably thought, would provide a lyrical work of contemporary urgency, epic in scope, a celebration of the institution and a dramatization of its sensitivity and insight. Barber's choice of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" was even suited to the occasion. After all, the play is about the tension between individual desire and civic responsibility. Antony is destroyed when he rejects the imperfect public realm -- the realm of the institution and state -- and submits himself to Cleopatra.

Barber was aware of the play's conflict between individual and institution. The opera's first act is rife with musical differences between the formal rhetoric of Rome and the sinuous melodies of Egypt. The later arias are almost submerged in private expressionism, as if the characters were absorbed into their isolated universe. But the opera stumbles in expressing this conflict. Barber was uncomfortable with the stilted Roman scenes and may have relied on Mr. Zeffi relli to provide the public grandeur. After the work flopped, Barber revised it, jettisoning Zeffirelli along with "all that Rotary Club talk by the Romans."

Chicago's production took this rejection a step further and turned the Romans into orgiasts and Caesar's love for his sister into incestuous passion, thus eliminating even the most trivial hint that Antony had something to be torn about. The opera became an elaborate, confusing set piece about sexual obsession, verging on kitsch. One would hardly know from its sometimes haunting music that there was anything outside of private desire; the public realm was just an annoyance, forcing the principals into neurotic suicide.

So from one extreme, in which the Institution tends to eclipse all, we reach the other, in which social life itself is dismembered. And isn't this division present throughout our musical life? On one hand we find music that is little more than self-exposure for like-minded listeners -- homage to Cleopatra's Egypt; on the other hand we find performance that is monumental display, with the dominant esthetic force being the grand institution -- homage to Caesar's Rome.

But our musical life must begin to flourish more between these two poles. We might hope, perhaps, for that now mythic mini-Met opera theater, or for more individual voices like those heard in the Met gala, or for more Institutional Performances that are musical tributes as well as institutional ones. We need both Egypt and Rome.

Photo: Catherine Malfitano and Richard Cowan in "Antony and Cleopatra" at the Lyric Opera of Chicago (Tony Romano/Lyric Opera)